Archive for July, 2012

E paid me a surprise visit today. We decided to have coffee in the cafe. On the way we ran into ML. I acknowledged her but she was sort of in between giving a half-feeble look of recognition and trying to avoid me at the same time. That was just the start of things to come.

So we were having drinks and she walked in a little later. And apparently turned away instead of even acknowledging him. Which he felt was unbecoming and frankly just childish behaviour. Oh well. It got me for a while and then I had to see my charges and it went away.

So why I am writing this here? I guess it’s one of those days when the bear gets you and you have to say, well played bear, and take it on the chin and move on.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that speech Lee Adama made in the reimagined BSG during Baltar’s trial. V and I have a ball repeating it during dinner, but today’s incident made it particularly resonant with me, especially the excerpt quoted below:

“This case…this case is built on emotion, on anger, bitterness, vengeance. But most of all, it is built on shame. (looking at his father) It’s about the shame of what we did to ourselves back on that planet. It’s about the guilt of those of us who ran away. Who ran away. And we’re trying to dump all that guilt and all that shame on one man and then flush him out the airlock, and hope that just gets rid of it all. So that we could live with ourselves. But that won’t work. That won’t work. That’s not justice; not to me. Not to me.”

Maybe why I still feel this twinge sometimes is because I haven’t forgiven myself. For being stupid and naive. For holding on to a delusion for so long. For letting myself hold on to the delusion even though deep down I knew there was nothing but couldn’t make myself really accept it, come to terms with it, and deal with it the way I finally did because it was too painful to handle the truth. For making mistakes. For being human.

I think that’s what Lee means. That real justice is for the Colonials to really forgive themselves and not try to make a scapegoat out of Baltar because in forgiving him, they commit the quintessential act of forgiving themselves. And that’s what civilisations, not gangs, do.

So I brought Above&Beyond’s Mixmag Ibiza mix to the gym today, and was lucky to be able to listen to the second half of it during my workout. I think trance helps me run more, makes me more motivated to try harder, run faster. The beat doesn’t let up, so I can’t let up either. I just wish I could get used to putting on earphones while working out. I’d hate the hassle of getting tangled up and all that. Maybe I should give it a try. It’s not often I have the whole gym to myself to blast Above&Beyond on the stereo.

Lessons were ok today. A bit of an anti-climax showing SevenNine the verses, but oh well. Finally the Bulletin’s done. Now it’s on to getting through 2 piles of compre CA. A bit weird reading that G calls PW a bitch, but as long as they plod on, I’m satisfied. Again Seveny’s newspapers go missing. We really need a CCTV, but to watch over newspapers?! GEMS is finally settled too; bowling it is. And I must remember to have that conversation with Mel about studies. Gotta weigh myself in mid-week. This is starting to become really random. I could polish off a couple of SQs or go home to Drop Dead Diva.

ST published a speech given by the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Raffles Institution’s 189th Founder’s Day last week. A worthy read that got me thinking.

The curse of the highly successful

By BILAHARI KAUSIKAN

My comrades and I spent our six years in Raffles Institution waging insurgency against all established authority. At a very tender age, one of our teachers told us we were all born to be hanged. And if that extreme did not come to pass – perhaps I should say, has not yet come to pass – several of us were at least caned. Our then principal failed to achieve his dearest ambition of getting us all expelled only due to our dumb luck.

So here I stand before you, living testimony to the role of chance and serendipity in life; a role more often than not, insufficiently acknowledged if not ignored, particularly by Singaporeans of a certain ilk. And that is my theme.

Eighty-five years ago, an American writer by the name of Thornton Wilder published a short novel entitled The Bridge Of San Luis Rey. The book has never been out of print, but deserves to be better known.

The novel begins at noon on a certain day in 1714 when a bridge in Peru – ‘the finest bridge in all Peru’, writes Wilder – inexplicably collapses and five people who happen at that moment to be crossing, plummet to their deaths.

The tragedy is witnessed by a devout Franciscan monk, in Peru for missionary work among the natives, who immediately asks himself: ‘Why did this happen to those five?’

The monk is convinced that it was not a random event but some manifestation of God’s Will for some greater end and vows to investigate so as to prove to the natives the necessity of divine purpose. But his investigation runs afoul of the Inquisition and he is burnt at the stake.

Wilder poses, but never directly answers, the question: ‘Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?’ The point, of course, is that it could have been any one of us on that metaphorical bridge.

I do not think that there is any particular meaning, pattern or direction, divine or secular, in the drift of human events. History, as Winston Churchill is reported to have remarked, is just one damned thing after another. The innocent die young and the wicked flourish; and not necessarily in equal measure either because to the wicked, the innocent are often prey.

The world is far too complex a place to be comprehended in any holistic way by the human mind. It is made up of too many moving parts interacting in too many unpredictable ways for human reason to grasp.

I mean, of course, the social world: the world of human interactions, human relationships and human institutions; of love and hatred, politics and economics, war and peace, infused with emotions like anger, pity, joy and sorrow, and not the material world of rocks and stones and trees and the earth’s diurnal course.

In the material world, the apple will always fall whether or not Newton was there to observe it. In the material world, all phenomena must ultimately conform to the laws of physics. In the material world, when we return to earth and ashes, we too will conform to the laws of physics.

But in the meantime, we inhabit a social world of sentient beings who observe, think and respond so that our every effort to act or comprehend alters what we try to comprehend and every thought and action begets a never-ending, ever-shifting kaleidoscope of unpredictable possibilities that makes all social science an oxymoron.

Reason may distinguish man from beast, but the sum of the interactions of different reasons, of many logics, is only coincidentally and occasionally logical. That is why actions always have unintended consequences even if they are not always immediately apparent, and our best-laid plans and most fervent hopes are constantly ambushed by chance and events.

Most things eventually fail. The shade of Ozymandias hovers unseen but omnipresent over every human enterprise, biding its time. The ancient Greeks advised us to call no man happy until he was dead. This is good advice. We can be reasonably certain of something only after it has occurred. The only true knowledge is historical, and even then there is always room for argument over interpretation.

None of us ever sees or understands the same thing, no matter how conscientiously we try to observe or communicate.

As I stand here speaking to you, at least three different things are occurring simultaneously: first, what I think; second, what I say to convey what I think which, whether because of the limitations of language or by design, will not always be the same as what I think: deception and self-deception are intrinsic parts of human nature; and third, what you hear and understand of what I had intended to convey, which is again not necessarily the same thing.

A world without fixed meaning

One could call this, after the title of a short story by the Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the Rashomon phenomenon. It makes for a world without fixed meaning, which accentuates its fundamental incomprehensibility. A world in which the past can only be partially known, the present is largely unknown and the future certainly unknowable.

None of us asked to be born. Yet having had life thrust upon us, we must, unless bent on suicide, nevertheless live. Although we can only, if dimly and darkly, know backwards, we have to live forwards.

No one can live in a constant Hamlet-like state of existential doubt. We must profess a certainty that we do not necessarily feel. To keep the metaphysical horror of unfathomable meaninglessness at bay, we all, singly or collectively, consciously or unconsciously, adopt mental frameworks to simplify a complex reality in order to deal with it.

Since the Enlightenment of the 17th century, belief in Reason has replaced belief in God as the primary organising mental framework of society. We are all the creatures of this Western-defined modernity and the most successful of the non-Western countries, Singapore among them, are precisely those who have embraced it the most closely.

Reason’s children include law and justice, philosophy, literature and the arts, economics and other social sciences and even the very belief in reason, progress, technology and science. But the fundamental mode of thought that underpins these trappings of reason is still theological in that whether our belief is in Reason or in God, it is still mere belief and not epistemologically provable beyond all doubt.

There is no end to philosophy any more than there can be an end to history. Stated in another way, none of Reason’s children have an autonomous reality separate from our apprehensions of them. They are socially constructed artefacts; frameworks of ideas that we have chosen to believe in, in order to comprehend the world, in order to live in a particular way.

Their utility is thus purely instrumental. They are at best all only partially and contingently right which means, of course, that they are all also always at least partially wrong. That includes, by the way, the ideas I am presently expounding.

I advance these arguments not to instil cynicism or despair but to suggest the possibility of liberation and hope.

Boundless potential

A rock is forever only a rock. But human beings are defined by their potentialities, and since there is no predetermined meaning to the unfolding of events, the potentialities are equally boundless. Were it not so, Singapore should not exist as a sovereign and independent country.

The only meaning in life that can exist is that which we create for ourselves. And unless we want our lives to be merely a slow, selfish dying, we ought to try to create some meaning larger than ourselves. This is, to my mind, an absolute duty imposed by the human condition, even if we know that uncertainty and error are constants and that we are always writing on sand before the advancing tide. Our duties to our families, our friends and our country endure when even hope is dead. These few fragments we shore against our ruin.

I am sure that by now many of you are harbouring a thought that you are too well brought up to speak out loud: This idiot exaggerates! Of course, I exaggerate. But only a little, and only for clarity’s sake, and not to distort or mislead. So let me restate my essential point in a different way.

Do not confuse the depth of sincerity with which you or others hold an idea, or the number of people who sincerely hold an idea, with its validity. Sincerity is an over-rated virtue, if indeed it is a virtue. All of you may be suddenly seized with the sincere conviction that pigs should fly. But pigs will nevertheless never sprout wings no matter how devoutly you hope for them to escape the surly bonds of earth.

And if you, ignoring the possibility of error, sincerely believe that pigs ought to fly; or that God’s Will has been revealed to you; or that you are one of the elect to whom the direction of History’s cunning passages has been vouchsafed, then it is but a tiny step to being convinced that anyone who does not share your conviction is not just ignorant but evil. Then for the greater glory of PIGS or HISTORY or GOD, it is only a tinier further step to seeing it as your bounden DUTY, to expunge the evil.

And it all inevitably ends as Wilder’s poor monk did, in flames at the stake.

Rather than sincerity, if we want to do some trifling and ephemeral good or at least to minimise harm, we should approach life with an ironic and humane scepticism. Irony to ensure that we retain a sense of proportion and as ballast against the inevitability of unintended consequences: today’s error being the correction of yesterday’s error. Humanity, so that we may empathise with logics other than our own, if only to better manoeuvre to impose our will because, in a world of competing logics, if we hope to do any good, we cannot hope to do so by logic alone. And scepticism, because the possibility of deception, our own self-deceptions if not those of others, casts constant shadows over every human action.

I have chosen to dwell on this at what you may consider inordinate length, because Raffles Institution (RI) likes to consider itself unique. Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry to inform you that RI is no longer unique.

The delusion of the intelligent

YOU are now only one of a number of similar elite educational institutions from which will come a disproportionate number of scholarship recipients and a disproportionate number of leaders in the civil service, the professions, business, the arts and the academy. And all these institutions are united by a certain sense of entitlement, possibly so profound as to be quite unconscious.
I do not blame you for this. All of you are highly intelligent. You will be very well educated. And the odds are that you will be more than averagely successful in your careers.

But understand that you will therefore also be more vulnerable to the curse of the highly intelligent, highly educated and highly successful: this curse is the illusion of certainty; the conviction of the omnipotence of your ideas.

This is the delusion that your ideas or words are validated by mere virtue by being thought or uttered by you! YOU and not some lesser being. And the more intelligent and the more successful and the more highly educated, the deeper the delusion. ‘The learned’, Adam Smith wrote, ‘ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination.’

Transition of power, ideas

SHORTLY after the 2008-2009 financial crisis, Mr Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, a powerful and erudite man, confessed in testimony to a Senate hearing that his intellectual assumptions of a lifetime had been shaken and he was still trying to understand what happened. I do not know if he has since come to any conclusions.

But it was clear that prior to the near global disaster, he had never even faintly contemplated the possibility that his beliefs may have been in error. We are all still paying the price of his certainties.

Yours will be a generation that will live through times of more than usual uncertainty.

A global transition of power and ideas is under way. Transition to what, no one can yet say. We have no maps and will have to improvise our way forward the best we can. It will be a transition measured in decades and not just a few years, and it is your misfortune that it is occurring as the technology of the Internet is making us solipsistic.

The Internet conflates and confuses our opinion with information and tempts us to immerse ourselves only in a circle of those who share and reinforce our own interests and views. It shortens attention spans and privileges the new and novel over any notion of lasting value.

Social media like Facebook have perverted the common meaning of ‘friend’ and ‘like’ beyond all recognition. Only a solipsist or, what is much the same thing, a narcissist, would think that what he or she had for lunch would be of wider interest; and only those with vacuous minds would be interested.

And this at a time when the safe navigation of uncharted waters requires a prudent modesty, openness and some minimal capacity for sustained thought.

And yet the Internet and its associated technologies is indispensable to modern life. But what its ultimate effects will be on society, on governance, on international relations, on the very way we think, no one yet knows.

I certainly have no answers. As you, the anointed ones, ready yourselves to assume authority and responsibility under these challenging circumstances, I can do no more than to remind you of what Oliver Cromwell wrote to the Synod of the Church of Scotland in 1650. He was trying to persuade the Scots not to embrace the Royalist cause of King Charles II and so avert civil war.

‘Gentlemen,’ he wrote, ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ (In the 17th century, the bowels were considered to be the seat of pity or the gentler emotions), think it possible that you may be mistaken’.

I too beseech you from whatever portion of anatomy you consider most dear, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

You may wish to know how it all ended. Cromwell’s advice was not heeded.

Shortly thereafter, the third English Civil War broke out. This set in motion a historical trajectory of political, social and economic changes that led to modern Britain, the Industrial Revolution, the East India Company, Sir Stamford Raffles, the British Empire, the founding of Singapore and ultimately, you and I.

And all because good advice fell on deaf ears.

What better way to appreciate the irony and contingency of events than to ponder what may have happened if Cromwell’s advice was in fact taken and civil war avoided. And as you do so, consider also the possibility that you may be mistaken when you think you are mistaken.

“The only meaning in life that can exist is that which we create for ourselves. And unless we want our lives to be merely a slow, selfish dying, we ought to try to create some meaning larger than ourselves.”

And I’m so glad the session with the Dementeds went off awesomely. They really stepped up. Finally the direction’s set, the way forward clear. Each member has a certainty now, a task solely theirs to nurture. It’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally happening. There’s an inexorable movement forward which will end well.

Slowly, the groups start differentiating themselves – some are slow jogging, others firing up their engines slowly but surely, yet others stuck at the block. The Big Birds now lead by a slim margin, having trotted out quite a lot of stuff this morning. Cookierella in close second, needing a unified theme. We had a working lunch today, and it was quite enjoyable.

Now I still have some WR chapter drafts to look at and the compre assignment that just came in.

I’m still mulling whether to show SevenNine those verses; I don’t know what they’ll make of it. The drama of the past two days has petered out a bit; I’m less emotional? more settled? about the whole thing. Maybe I’ve made peace with the fact that I can only change myself; they have to decide to make the change if they want to. I have more than once stressed the consequences; I have extended help, support, encouragement, whatever I can do, when needed. I have tempered strictness with care and concern. I don’t wrestle with what more I can do anymore. Maybe that’s what letting them step up really means – pure, simple faith. CM honestly told me today they were busy with other things. I can’t make them priortise what’s important in their lives – only they can do that, because they decide what’s important, for better or worse.

On a different note, it’s interesting when people see me going or returning from the gym, and invariably professing that they’ll join me soon, or get started or something similar. I just smile and say nothing. What is there to say? Encouragement seems pointless if self-will trumps all. We obsess about visibility and forget about quiet determination going about its work unseen and voiceless. I used to hanker about being visible. Now I’d rather be left alone to do my thing, in solitude.

I have not been late for The Job since I started this journey. Another metric that measures nothing for others but loads for me.

Saw one grp from SevenOne today and for the first time when I heard the words ‘we are here for therapy’ I felt really therapied out. Maybe because of the bump in the road. I did what I could, but the heady times of two weeks ago seems a distant memory. Euphoria’s bright sceptre seems to have dimmed. Maybe I was scared all that cheerleading would lead to naught again. Maybe it has evolved into something less euphoric and more sedate but stable. I don’t know. But what touched me was their concern for my health. How I should get more carbs. That was unexpected but another one of life’s moments that throws us off in a good way I guess.

I’m still mulling whether to show SevenNine those verses; I don’t know what they’ll make of it. The drama of the past two days has petered out a bit; I’m less emotional? more settled? about the whole thing. Maybe I’ve made peace with the fact that I can only change myself; they have to decide to make the change if they want to. I have more than once stressed the consequences; I have extended help, support, encouragement, whatever I can do, when needed. I have tempered strictness with care and concern. I don’t wrestle with what more I can do anymore. Maybe that’s what letting them step up really means – pure, simple faith. CM honestly told me today they were busy with other things. I can’t make them priortise what’s important in their lives – only they can do that, because they decide what’s important, for better or worse.

On a different note, it’s interesting when people see me going or returning from the gym, and invariably professing that they’ll join me soon, or get started or something similar. I just smile and say nothing. What is there to say? Encouragement seems pointless if self-will trumps all. We obsess about visibility and forget about quiet determination going about its work unseen and voiceless. I used to hanker about being visible. Now I’d rather be left alone to do my thing, in solitude.

I have not been late for The Job since I started this journey. Another metric that measures nothing for others but loads for me.

Saw one grp from SevenOne today and for the first time when I heard the words ‘we are here for therapy’ I felt really therapied out. Maybe because of the bump in the road. I did what I could, but the heady times of two weeks ago seems a distant memory. Euphoria’s bright sceptre seems to have dimmed. Maybe I was scared all that cheerleading would lead to naught again. Maybe it has evolved into something less euphoric and more sedate but stable. I don’t know. But what touched me was their concern for my health. How I should get more carbs. That was unexpected but another one of lite’s moments that throws us off in a good way I guess.

Sometimes you hit a bump in the road
And mistake it for a boulder
But it’s just that voice inside you
trying to pull you over
They say you gotta listen to your heart
but what if it’s the one that’s tearing you apart?

So you gotta have faith
That it’s just a bump in the road
The world isn’t perfect
wrapped in clear new bubble wrap
Intact so long as you live life unpierced
So everyone join hands
and together sail for better lands

We can’t go back to the way we were
Comfort zones are sweet but they just make you retweet
unfresh thoughts made long ago
and pictures sepia-toned by another’s woe
But you’ve moved into new spaces
Finally solved the puzzles and the sticky twisty mazes
So say goodbye to your yesterday self
until you meet him again in unfamiliar places
There beside that bump in the road
You’ll know just how much you’ve grown

So you gotta have faith
That it’s just a bump in the road
The world isn’t perfect
wrapped in clear new bubble wrap
Intact so long as you live life unpierced
So everyone join hands
and together sail for better lands

Feeling a little annoyed now, and don’t want to feel this way. A little disappointed with SevenNine just now; it’s like they can get high on fun stuff but ask them to step up for serious stuff, and well….

Okay, I know I shouldn’t feel this way, that I should stick to my belief that things will take a while to get better. That’s why I’m a little annoyed with myself for expecting a change in performance so quickly. Why is it that I believe in them but it’s so hard to get out of the rationalist, I’ve-done-my-part-now-I-want-to-see-results mode? I’ve seen them do good work. I know they can do it. And yet….

I really hope I didn’t just undo weeks of good work. They deserve better from me.

[TIME PASSES – ABOUT 5 HOURS]

I never really considered it. Really, I didn’t.

That they would see the new ‘nice’ me as someone they could take advantage of, in the belief that nice people on The Job won’t bear to get angry, won’t be unhappy with poor performance, just content to be part of the tyranny of low expectations, presumably because they don’t want to sour the relationship. Especially when things are going well and everyone is – seemingly – happy.

And all it took was 1 PW consult for it all to come tumbling down. Or has it?

Should I be mad? Hurt? Betrayed? Bemused? Weary, because it was bound to happen; better sooner than later? Less starry eyed? Utterly, utterly stupid – because I was just telling 3 of the 7A alum who came to visit – ET, HJ and WK – how glad I was for making the change, and how they are responding positively?

I admit, for a time I was hurt, betrayed, weary, whatever. And now, typing this, I’m thinking maybe I should take another perspective. Maybe it’s just a few people who think that way; that as long as there’s one person who has resolved to do his/her best, I should continue because they deserve way way better than old me. I am tempted to put down names here; but hold back because I am not sure. (Does it matter that 4 people were absent today?) How to be, after what just happened? Or maybe it doesn’t matter even if everyone thinks like that – it still doesn’t change the fact that I needed to change because what I am doing is right, for both our goods. Old me would have said, told you so, nothing ever changes, you get screwed over because you are innocent and naive and see the good where it doesn’t exist. And old me is still lurking around.

But maybe, just maybe, this is a test of my resolve, of my belief. That’s why I’m not changing the title of this post – it’s still going to be called ‘bump in the road’. Because it is a bump in the road – how could I not have expected their skepticism, their reservations? Maybe this is an act after all, and he will be back to his old self once the first roadblock is encountered? But I cannot go back. To go back is to face death, sheer, utter nullity. They have every right to be skeptical; I don’t. Anyway, if this IS the right way to go, then it is the right way no matter what reception I get. And something deep down tells me things have changed in a deeper, more meaningful way. They KNOW what it is to give their best. Maybe it’s their first encounter with something they have never encountered before, so it’s easy to get sucked back into the old ways. I know this first hand.

So maybe this just makes me want to try harder, or do my best (if ‘harder’ has somewhat the lurkings of obsession about it) at the very least. They can tire; they are entitled to it, being callow youth after all. I cannot. I will not. For there is no alternative, no looking back.

I’m not exactly a looker as a pillar of salt.

Speaking of more pleasant things, I wish I could have spent more time with ET, HJ and WK. They don’t come back very often, and there’s so much to say, to catch up on. I admit I almost didn’t want to go to consult because 30 minutes is so not enough. But now, writing this, I am reminded that our time is limited; there is never enough time. So I should be glad to have shared what I did, to hear the little I heard, because it does make the next meeting that much sweeter, that much more treasured. And anyway, they are on FB, we could connect more if we wanted. TS also dropped by while we were talking; she’s going to Coventry this fall. 2 generations of 7A meet, serendipitously.

It’s coming up to 5. I’m going to end this post here and get to gym. I made this change, and I will stick by it. I will get by the bump in the road.

Sometimes, all that matters is that you’ve got to have a little faith (okay I think I’ll add this to the title after all:)

So I was at Mat Zo’s set at Zouk last night with Ed, and he brought the house down with his classics ‘Superman’ and ‘Mozart’ and many more. Even though I didn’t try to get his autograph, it was a good experience to get out of the marking zone and hear a live prog house set after a long time out of clubbing.

The only down moment was when the alcohol – even if it was just a little – kicked in and I hit rock bottom again, and all the bad memories about her and the hurt of realising it was just an icing-layer friendship just surfaced and there I was, on the dance floor, jammed packed with dozens of happy, partying bodies and yet thoroughly, completely incapable of feeling a tinge of happiness. I was literally moored to misery, while the others were happy little floating islands of neon light and strobes.

So I left the dance floor and I puked it all out – bad feelings and all – and I was okay again, which meant I could really enjoy the climax of the set properly.

This confirms what I already know very early on. Booze just gets me down. I’ve been down and I don’t want to stay down anymore. Some people say alcohol gives them a high. Not me. I get high seeing my charges’ eyes slowly brightening from realisation, from discovery. I get high from a good trance set. I get high in the gym. In other words, from good things.

I’ll leave the booze to you, bud. I know you meant well when you told me to text her ‘many returns of the day, but I’m sorry I can’t take this journey together with you anymore’ but I really don’t feel I need to. Not anymore.

CM’s really coming into her own in the realisation thingy. Today she Whatsapped her insights faster than I could type the prompt question! She really has been amazing. I hope the others were watching. And learning.